The longest-running, leading study of investor behavior was released for 2014 this week, and the key conclusion is easy to see: We’re doomed.

This is not a call on the market or some forecast for a crash, but a simple statement that investors simply refuse to learn from mistakes, meaning they are condemned to repeat them over and over again.

The 20th Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior study from Boston-based DALBAR Inc. continues on research which has shown dating back to 1984 that investors don’t do nearly as well as the investments they buy. A combination of buying after market upticks and selling after disappointments has average investors routinely buying high and selling low, rather than simply capturing the long-term trends of the underlying investments.

The results, predictably, are ugly.

Over the last 20 years, for example, the Standard & Poor’s 500 has returned an average of 9.22 percent per annum, but the typical investor has netted just 5.02 percent. That gap of 4.2 percentage points actually widened in 2013 while the market was booming, largely because investors keep guessing wrong on when to invest.

With 30 years of data now in the fold, however, DALBAR President Lou Harvey said there is simply no denying that the results show that “trying to correct irrational investor behavior through education is futile. … Investor education, as we know it today, just is not working.”

Ouch.

That’s not just my reaction as someone whose job, up to a point, is to educate investors, but there’s pain here because we’re at a time in our society when average people more than ever before hold their financial future in their own hands. The days of steady pensions for long work careers are mostly over, replaced by retirement-savings plans where the average investor is pulling the trigger on the decisions.

In taking their own shots, Harvey said investors routinely shoot themselves in their own feet.

“Now if you are one person and you choose to go learn things and you take it on yourself to find good information and figure things out, you may not be a part of the problem,” said Harvey, “but society on the whole is failing to educate people at a time when it has never been more important that we educate people.”

The problem is that investors routinely set expectations too high, figuring that the market average is the worst they should do, and assuming they are making the optimal choices and letting someone else make up the negative statistics.

Page 2 of 2 - The risk-driven factors boil down to understanding and controlling the dangers being faced – and recognizing that risk tolerance changes over time – and then having the financial industry present information in a way that will never happen, making statements about the probability of returns within a target range.

If Harvey had his way, a fund would have to tell investors “There’s an X percent chance that our results will fall in a specific range, and a Y percent change they land in a lesser [or better] range.”

Financial services firms and regulators aren’t going to go for that. Without it – a significant change designed to help investors understand their likelihood for success – Harvey expects failure to continue.

The real folly, however, may be in what investors are trying to learn and how they apply it to their investments, because so much of investor education is about doing what’s “optimal,” which means one thing to investment pros and something altogether different for average folks.

“If we could turn the discussion to get people focused on just putting more money away and managing it safely, we would solve a lot more problems than when we talk about eeking out a few extra basis points,” said personal finance expert Jean Chatzky, financial editor at NBC Today..”

The good news is that individual investors get to decide if they become a statistic here.

“Without significant changes, investor education on a societal level is futile,” said Harvey, “but any individual can always take it upon themselves to learn to do things the right way – to avoid the impulses and the irrational decisions. … The problem is that most people don’t recognize that’s what they’re doing now, but the numbers show that irrational investor behavior is getting worse, not better.”

Chuck Jaffe is senior columnist for MarketWatch. He can be reached at cjaffe@marketwatch.com